Performance Considerations

We have already mentioned in the previous section that simply collecting the
possible roots had a very tiny performance impact, but this is when you
compare PHP 5.2 against PHP 5.3. Although the recording of possible roots
compared to not recording them at all, like in PHP 5.2, is slower, other
changes to the PHP runtime in PHP 5.3 prevented this particular performance
loss from even showing.

There are two major areas in which performance is affected. The first
area is reduced memory usage, and the second area is run-time delay when
the garbage collection mechanism performs its memory cleanups. We will
look at both of those issues.

Reduced Memory Usage

First of all, the whole reason for implementing the garbage collection
mechanism is to reduce memory usage by cleaning up circular-referenced
variables as soon as the prerequisites are fulfilled. In PHP's
implementation, this happens as soon as the root-buffer is full, or when
the function gc_collect_cycles() is called. In
the graph below, we display the memory usage of the script below,
in both PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3, excluding the base memory that PHP
itself uses when starting up.

In this very academic example, we are creating an object in which a
property is set to point back to the object itself. When the $a variable
in the script is re-assigned in the next iteration of the loop, a memory
leak would typically occur. In this case, two zval-containers are leaked
(the object zval, and the property zval), but only one possible root is
found: the variable that was unset. When the root-buffer is full after
10,000 iterations (with a total of 10,000 possible roots), the garbage
collection mechanism kicks in and frees the memory associated with those
possible roots. This can very clearly be seen in the jagged memory-usage
graph for PHP 5.3. After each 10,000 iterations, the mechanism kicks in
and frees the memory associated with the circular referenced variables.
The mechanism itself does not have to do a whole lot of work in this
example, because the structure that is leaked is extremely simple. From
the diagram, you see that the maximum memory usage in PHP 5.3 is about 9
Mb, whereas in PHP 5.2 the memory usage keeps increasing.

Run-Time Slowdowns

The second area where the garbage collection mechanism influences
performance is the time taken when the garbage collection mechanism
kicks in to free the "leaked" memory. In order to see how much this is,
we slightly modify the previous script to allow for a larger number of
iterations and the removal of the intermediate memory usage figures. The
second script is here:

Przykład #2 GC performance influences

<?phpclass Foo{ public $var = '3.1415962654';}

for ( $i = 0; $i <= 1000000; $i++ ){$a = new Foo;$a->self = $a;}

echo memory_get_peak_usage(), "\n";?>

We will run this script two times, once with the
zend.enable_gc setting turned
on, and once with it turned off:

On my machine, the first command seems to take consistently about 10.7
seconds, whereas the second command takes about 11.4 seconds. This is a
slowdown of about 7%. However, the maximum amount of memory used by the
script is reduced by 98% from 931Mb to 10Mb. This benchmark is not very
scientific, or even representative of real-life applications, but it
does demonstrate the memory usage benefits that this garbage collection
mechanism provides. The good thing is that the slowdown is always the
same 7%, for this particular script, while the memory saving
capabilities save more and more memory as more circular references are
found during script execution.

PHP's Internal GC Statistics

It is possible to coax a little bit more information about how the
garbage collection mechanism is run from within PHP. But in order to do
so, you will have to re-compile PHP to enable the benchmark and
data-collecting code. You will have to set the CFLAGS
environment variable to -DGC_BENCH=1 prior to running
./configure with your desired options. The following
sequence should do the trick:

Przykład #4 Recompiling PHP to enable GC benchmarking

export CFLAGS=-DGC_BENCH=1
./config.nice
make clean
make

When you run the above example code again with the newly built PHP
binary, you will see the following being shown after PHP has finished
execution:

The most informative statistics are displayed in the first block. You
can see here that the garbage collection mechanism ran 110 times, and in
total, more than 2 million memory allocations were freed during those
110 runs. As soon as the garbage collection mechanism has run at least
one time, the "Root buffer peak" is always 10000.

Conclusion

In general the garbage collector in PHP will only cause a slowdown when the
cycle collecting algorithm actually runs, whereas in normal (smaller)
scripts there should be no performance hit at all.

However, in the cases where the cycle collection mechanism does run for
normal scripts, the memory reduction it will provide allows more of
those scripts to run concurrently on your server, since not so much
memory is used in total.

The benefits are most apparent for longer-running scripts, such as
lengthy test suites or daemon scripts. Also, for » PHP-GTK applications
that generally tend to run longer than scripts for the Web, the new
mechanism should make quite a bit of a difference regarding memory leaks
creeping in over time.